The Collected Poems of Amelia Alderson Opie

The Collected Poems of Amelia Alderson Opie offers the first collected, scholarly edition of poetical writings of one of the most celebrated women writers of the early nineteenth century. It brings together poems from a variety of sources, including three volumes of poetry assembled by the author, annual anthologies, periodicals, songs, manuscripts, fictional tales, broad sheets, separately published pamphlets, and unpublished private correspondence. The poems included cover the entire range of Opie’s long career, starting with her earliest surviving works from the 1790s and extending through her last poems in 1850. The arrangement proposed for this edition gives an overall sense of Opie’s development from her early experiments with short lyrics appearing in The Annual Anthology, The Cabinet, and The European Magazine to her first large-scale success with Poems and the publication of a number of song lyrics, to the longer narrative poems in The Warrior’s Return to the final
phase of her publishing life after officially joining the Quakers in 1825 - the appearance of Lays for the Dead, a sequence of elegies for both private and public figures. Until now, Opie has been known primarily through a few frequently anthologized poems focusing on her response to the war with France and her support of the abolition movement. The Collected Poems offers the opportunity to explore more fully the contribution made to literary culture in the period by a woman who throughout her life used poetry as the basis of affective connection with her world.

Shelley King is Associate Professor of English at Queen’s University, Canada, where she teaches courses in Romantic and Victorian British Literature and in the History of Children’s Literature. In addition to co-editing (with John B. Pierce) Opie’s Adeline Mowbray (1999) and The Father and Daughter (2003), she has published articles on Opie’s poetry in journals including Eighteenth-Century Studies and Romanticism on the Net. She has also published on contemporary author Phillip Pullman in Children’s Literature and is currently completing a monograph on his work.

John B. Pierce is Professor of English at Queen’s University, Canada. He teaches courses in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Romanticism. Before embarking on the study of Opie and Romantic Women Writers, he specialized in the works of William Blake, publishing two monographs--The Wondrous Art: William Blake and Writing (2003) and Flexible Design: Revisionary Poetics in Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas (1998)--as well as articles on Blake, Shelley, and Richardson.